Cast Me Gently (29 page)

“I’m here for someone who’s being released today,” Teresa said quickly, before he could say dogs weren’t allowed. She took her sunglasses off. “This is his dog.”

“Who is it?” The officer consulted a clipboard.

“Dog—uh, John Doe,” she corrected herself.

He looked up and peered at her more closely. “You the one he saved?”

Teresa nodded in relief. “Yes.” It had taken forever to get the people in authority to believe that he had been her rescuer, not her attacker.

“Wait here.” He gave Lucy one last curious glance and disappeared through a door.

A few minutes later, Dogman emerged through another heavy steel door, his backpack slung over one shoulder. Lucy immediately began whining and dancing in an effort to get to him. Teresa let go of the leash. He dropped the backpack, knelt down, and buried his face in her neck as she licked every bit of him she could reach. After a few minutes, he stood, wiping his hand roughly across his eyes.

“Thanks for taking care of her.”

Teresa smiled. “I couldn’t leave her in the pound. She’s been no trouble at all.” She hefted the shopping bag. “I have what’s left of her food in here. And,” she pulled out a dark-gray bundle. “I thought you might not want to have my father’s old winter coat anymore after the trouble it caused. Here’s another.”

He looked from the coat to her as he picked up his backpack. “You didn’t have to do that. You don’t owe me anything.”

“But I do,” Teresa said. She pushed the coat back into the bag. “I will never know how you happened to be there that night, but I can never repay you for what you did.”

He nodded and accepted the bag. They turned toward the front door and descended the steps to the sidewalk below. Dogman stopped and looked up at the summer sky.

“It’s been a while,” he said.

He knelt down and stuffed the dog food and coat into his backpack and refastened the flap. Slipping the straps over his shoulders, he picked up Lucy’s leash and stood. He gave Teresa one last nod.

“Are you Daniel?” she blurted. She knew it was impossible, but she had to ask.

He turned and looked at her. “I don’t know who that is.”

CHAPTER 30

Ellie made her way
through the cemetery to her mother’s grave. There, she laid a sealed plastic baggie at the foot of the tombstone. Inside the bag was Daniel’s Bronze Star. She’d included a note with the address of Louise’s diner if he wanted to know where to find her.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back, Mom. It might be a while.” She sat back on her heels and looked around at the squirrels running around like mad, gathering nuts as summer drew to a close. “I might finally get to travel and see some places. I’ll tell you about it when I come back.”

Are you doing the right thing?

She closed her eyes. She’d asked herself that question a million times. She still didn’t know if it was the right thing to do, but Louise was right. She had to start living her life instead of spending it in one place waiting for people who weren’t coming back. Including Teresa.

Ellie had hoped, after her talk with Teresa at Rob and Karen’s house, that she’d come around, and they could leave together. All through her conversations with Marion, Louise’s cousin, during all the hours of her bus trip to Baltimore to meet her and look for an apartment, the days spent packing up her things. Through all of those preparations, she kept hoping for Teresa’s knock on the door, for a phone call saying she’d changed her mind, but there had been nothing.

“Bye, Mom.”

She got to her feet and walked back to her apartment. Sullivan had borrowed a pickup truck from a friend, and they had loaded her bed, sofa and television into the back of it. She had sold or given away all of the rest of her furniture. Her clothes fit into two new suitcases—a bon voyage gift from Louise.

“I’m going to miss you so much,” Ellie had whispered last night, holding Louise tightly.

“I’ll miss you, too, Ellie.” Louise rocked her. “But you’ll be back to visit, and now I’ll have another reason to come see my cousin.”

Upstairs, Ellie took one more trip around her empty apartment, stripped now of all the travel posters. It felt sad and lonely.
Any lonelier than it has been since she left?
KC meowed pitifully from inside her carrier. Sullivan knocked on the open door into the living room.

“All set?”

Ellie sighed. “I guess.” She picked up a paper-wrapped parcel. “You sure you don’t mind delivering this?”

“I don’t mind. I’ll get it to her.”

She picked up the cat carrier. “Let’s go.”

Teresa sat in a pew in St. Rafael’s, breathing in the familiar scent of incense and automatically responding to the priest along with everyone else.

“Remember when it was our First Communion?” Bernie whispered. “God, that seems like someone else’s life, doesn’t it?”

Teresa nodded. Everything she did lately felt like it belonged to someone else’s life. She was back at the Bloomfield store, but not back home. Rob had helped her find a small house to rent—“with a washer and dryer,” she’d noted with a wry smile.

“Are you going to bring your bedroom furniture from home?” Bernie had asked.

Teresa had scoffed. “I’ve had that bedroom furniture almost since I got out of a crib. I think I’m ready to buy my own stuff.”

The house still looked pretty empty—only a bed and dresser, a chair with an ottoman and a good reading lamp, and a small kitchen table with two chairs.

“You sure you don’t want a television at least?” Karen had asked when she and Rob came over to see how she was doing.

Teresa shook her head. “I’m enjoying the quiet. I’m getting tons of reading done.”
And the more furniture I buy, the more permanent this feels,
only she didn’t say that part out loud.

She couldn’t explain, even to herself, why she wasn’t ready to make it feel more permanent, but ever since Sullivan had come by the store with Ellie’s package…

“Baltimore? She really moved to Baltimore?” she’d asked.

“Yeah. I helped her move,” he said. “She’s working for Louise’s cousin. Got a nice apartment. Starting over.”

Starting over.

She closed her eyes now as Father Luigi droned on with his homily on original sin and how sacraments like First Communion bring sinners back to that state of innocence abandoned after childhood. She hadn’t really believed Ellie could do it—leave Pittsburgh, leave her parents’ graves, leave Daniel and her never-ending search for him—but she had.

Could you?

That question had been nagging at her more and more.

It’s not that simple.

Sitting on her dresser—the only ornamental thing in her entire apartment—was the calligraphy Ellie had made for her mother and asked Sullivan to deliver to her. Sitting beside it was Ellie’s note.
I hope one day you’ll come to me with this, but if you don’t, keep it to remember me.

Lately, Teresa had felt stirrings of something she couldn’t at first identify. She found herself daydreaming about what Ellie might be doing now, or she would read something and her first thought was,
I have to remember to tell Ellie about that.
Her nightmares were becoming less frequent and less vivid. There had been a few good dreams, too, even some erotic ones in which Ellie was making love to her, and she woke throbbing with an orgasm.

Teresa snapped to as the homily ended, and everyone shifted.

Father Luigi began blessing the bread and wine for Communion, and there was a stir of excitement. Daniela’s second grade class filled the first two rows so they could watch the momentous preparations for this milestone in their lives. When it was time, the nuns whispered to the children, herding them to the back of the nave so they could line up two by two, girls on the right, boys on the left. In their columns, they marched solemnly down the center aisle, the boys wearing their first suits, hair slicked back, cheeks soft and rosy, while the girls patted the full skirts of their white dresses, some still wearing lace pinned to their hair, a few with white gloves. Daniela gave a nervous wave as she marched by, almost walking up the heels of the girl in front of her. Francesca put a hand over her eyes and shook her head.

Can you even remember what it felt like to be that excited by something?
Teresa frowned, trying to recall. She’d certainly been excited, giddy even, about things as a girl—First Communion, first bicycle, starting high school, going to college—but then, her life had settled into a… a flatness, where nothing seemed extraordinary, nothing stood out. Until Ellie. Ellie had brought color and joy and excitement back into a life that had become merely existence. Teresa shook her head.
I’m reading too much,
she thought with a droll smile. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that her life had become flat again, monochromatic, like a black and white photo.

After the Mass was over, every family jostled for photos of their child standing on the steps in front of the altar.

“This is going to take forever,” Bernie whispered. “Come on.”

“I’m going to stay,” Mrs. D’Armelio said. “I’ll see you at the Martellis.”

Together, Teresa and Bernie escaped into the bright September sunshine. “Shit. This is going to be a big deal, isn’t it?”

“Yup. As big as Christmas,” Teresa said. She retrieved her sunglasses from her purse. “My family hasn’t had an occasion like this for ages. My mother and the aunts are going to make the most of it.” She grabbed Bernie’s elbow. “Let’s walk. Leave the car here.”

Bernie looked at her as if she were crazy, but shrugged and reached for a cigarette. “So, how’s the new place?”

“Different.” Teresa squinted up at the brilliantly blue sky. “I have never lived alone. You have any idea how weird that feels?”

Bernie thought about it. “I haven’t, either. Jesus, I won’t live alone until Mom dies. That might not be until I’m retired. She’ll live forever.”

Teresa chuckled. For all of Bernie’s complaining about her mother, Teresa could not see her living alone, cooking or cleaning for herself. She didn’t want to think about what that house would look like if Bernie lived there by herself.

“What are you going to do for your birthday?”

Teresa looked at her in shock. “I forgot. Thirty-five next month. Damn. Can you believe we’re this old?”

Bernie snorted. “You mean, this old and exactly where we were when we got out of college. Are we still going to be here in another thirty-five years?”

“Good night, you guys. See you tomorrow.”

Ellie waved to the cooks and waitstaff as she locked up the restaurant. Marion’s original restaurant was in Riverside, on the west side of the Inner Harbor, but she had reasoned that having another location on the east side would be a smart move for those customers who didn’t want to navigate Baltimore’s downtown traffic. The new location in Fell’s Point was doing well. Ellie liked the artsy feel of this section of the city. The only downside was the smell. She sniffed her sleeve as she walked under the streetlights. It was hard to get the fishy smell out of her clothes and hair. She’d been lucky enough to find a small apartment on the second floor over an art gallery. It had been the artist’s living quarters and studio before he started becoming successful. It had large windows that gave her a wonderful view of the city’s skyline. She carried a stout walking stick. She hadn’t had any trouble, but most nights, she got out of the restaurant after the buses stopped running, and walking was her only option. She only had to go eight blocks to get home, but she kept scanning her surroundings as she walked.

Funny,
she thought,
I used to walk around Pittsburgh at all hours and never worried at all.

Maybe you should have worried more,
replied a small voice in her head.
If you had, she’d still be with you.

She walked faster, trying to outpace those unwelcome thoughts, but she knew better. They’d been her constant companions since that night. For Ellie, life would never be the same. One stupid decision had changed things forever. Teresa could not forgive her, and now she was alone —again—but more alone than she’d ever been in her life. Marion was nice, but she wasn’t Louise. She was Ellie’s boss, not her friend, and though she had helped get Ellie set up in the new restaurant, she only came by three or four times a week to check on things.

Approaching her building, she looked around to make sure no one was nearby, waiting to pounce as she unlocked the door. The area looked deserted. She unlocked the door and quickly flipped the lock again as soon as she was inside. There, pushed through the mail slot, was the day’s mail. She gathered it up and climbed the stairs to her apartment. She could hear KC meowing as she unlocked the door at the top of the stairs.

“Hi, little one.” She picked KC up and felt the vibration of her purr against her chest. She carried the cat into the kitchen and spooned a little canned food for her. She set cat and food on the table and sat to leaf through her mail, smiling when she saw a letter from Louise. She’d never been much of a letter writer—
who did I ever have to write before?
—but she had written Louise and Sullivan regularly since moving. Sullivan didn’t write back very often, but Ellie didn’t expect much from him. She wrote because it gave her something to do. Her schedule was much different now. She was working a lot of hours, often not getting home until after midnight and then back at work by ten the next morning, but the pay was good. She was saving money,
and what else would you do with your time anyhow?
She wondered sometimes how Suzanne and Linda were doing, but she found she didn’t miss the bank at all. She did miss other things, though. She’d said good-bye to Larry, riding his bus one last time before she left, and she’d gone to the little park near the bank to sit one last time, watching the old men play chess, and the mothers with their babies, and the street people wandering around.

She read Louise’s letter, full of bits of this and that, nothing special, but it warmed her heart to read it. She placed it with all the others in a stack on the table. She turned out all the lights and went to shower. A few minutes later, she was sitting on the couch, a towel draped over her shoulders as she continued rubbing her hair dry, looking out the windows at the lit silhouettes of the skyscrapers in the distance. KC jumped into her lap and settled contentedly. Ellie reached over to the side table where stood a vase with a dried white rose—the one Teresa had left at her door—and she felt again that ache where her heart used to be.
It’s still there,
she reminded herself, touching a finger to the gold heart hanging around her neck—
crooked and bent, but whole.